


What Doesn't Kill You Gives You Friends

by bethagain



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, JediFest, Life on Tatooine, Rogue Robin, Rogue Robin phase two, pre-episode IV, roguerobin015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-11 03:24:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10453848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain
Summary: It's the worst sandstorm in a decade, three days of wind that topples vaporators all across the Chott Salt Flats.Owen Lars is not a man to ask for help, especially not from a former Jedi knight.But it's going to take all the hands available to get the farm up and running again.(A continuation ofthis story under the same titlebyPerspicacia.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [What doesn’t kill you gives you friends.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10064123) by [Perspicacia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perspicacia/pseuds/Perspicacia). 



> This is a continuation of a story started by Perspicacia for Jedifest's Rogue Robin. 
> 
> Read the first part [here.](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/2017RogueRobin/works/10064123)
> 
> Hopefully a new writer will pick it up for round three!

Obi-Wan’s home has a rounded roof made of thick adobe over stone. The wind slides over it silently. 

The walls of his house make sharp corners, and there the wind passes with shrieks and howls. Sand patters against flat surfaces with a sound like driving sleet. 

Not that Tatooine has ever known sleet, or the pounding rains that Obi-Wan remembers from his boyhood on Coruscant. Here, moisture must be pulled by intention from the air. 

But Tatooine does know storms. There is a part of the year when the twin suns are farthest apart in the sky, making patterns of heat and cold that stir up the wind. As the wind lifts the sand, the sand dims the light and the surface temperature fluctuates. And Tatooine faces tempests of unpredictable power. 

Sometimes there is just a stiff breeze that rearranges the dunes around Obi-Wan’s small dwelling. 

Sometimes the wind screams all night, and sand sneaks in around the closed doors and shuttered windows.

This storm is the worst Obi-Wan has seen in his five years of self-imposed exile.

It’s in its third day of sand-filled air, with twilight darkness even when the suns are highest in the sky. Three days of howling, wailing wind that would have drowned out voices, if Obi-Wan had anyone to talk to. Three days that he hasn’t even been able to get out to the cistern for water. 

He tried, once, donning gloves to protect his hands and wrapping cloth around his face below clariplast goggles. A moment after he stepped outside, the cloth was torn from his mouth and nose and there was sand on his tongue, between his teeth, in the back of his throat. Then the wind caught the goggles, breaking their seal. He retraced his several steps with eyes shut tight, then had to tug hard on the door to get it to open against the wind. It slammed hard behind him.

In that brief moment, a fine layer of sand covered the floor and made a drift against the far wall.

Obi-Wan goes to the storage cupboard for a broom. He sweeps up the sand and leaves it in a pile near the door, to be pushed back out into the desert when the wind finally dies. Then he tucks the broom neatly away again.

He’s been using a bucket for waste. It’s covered over with a flat stone for a lid and sprinkled with lime. In spite of his efforts, the whole house smells vaguely of shit, but there’s nothing to be done about that. If he tried to toss the contents out the door they’d blow right in again. That would be a lot harder to clean up than dry sand.

He’s spent many hours sitting by a shuttered window, listening to the desert blowing around outside. He’s taken time each day to work through a kata with his lightsaber, blade off to keep from slicing through furniture or walls. He’s spent more time at his bare wooden table with its uncomfortable chairs. He’s writing his story, Anakin’s story, a story that he hopes Luke will read someday and continue with his own.

Luke.

Obi-Wan hasn’t seen the child in… it must be months, now. 

Owen has thanked him for giving Beru a son. Obi-Wan, watching from afar, is assured that Owen is even more head-over-heels for the boy than Beru, who lights up whenever Luke is in her presence. But while Beru’s love is gentle and strong, Owen’s is fierce and has a touch of anger. He knows what happened to Anakin, or at least, he knows how Anakin “died.” And he knows Obi-Wan had something to do with it. 

Owen wants Luke safe, and so Obi-Wan is banished here to the desert. He is trusted to provide early warning if the Empire comes looking, but he, his connection to the Force, his history as a Jedi… none are welcome in the Lars’ home.

As late afternoon turns to evening, the dimness in the closed-up house starts to drop toward real darkness. The place is powered by a primitive solar cell, but when Obi-Wan goes to turn on a lamp, he finds that it’s gone dead after three days without direct sunlight. 

He turns in early, accepting the darkness, as he has accepted so much of this life on Tatooine.

 

Obi-Wan wakes early. The inside of the hut is dim, faint light edging the shutters. Outside there is silence. 

When he opens the door, he finds that the dune that used to shade his front step has been scoured flat. He walks around the house, taking in the drift that rises almost to the roof on the sunset side and the swath of pebbles round the corner, uncovered where there used to be soft sand. 

The cistern is still sealed tight, its cover well-designed for Tatooine’s fury. But when he opens it, there is only a liter or so of water glinting up from the very bottom. The vaporator that should stand tall next to his house is tilted, its spired top resting against the roof.

Obi-Wan is gazing up at it, wondering what to do, when the growl of an engine breaks the silence behind him.

“You’ll need some help to fix that.”

It’s Owen Lars. His voice is gruff: It’s a statement, not a question. He stays seated in the ancient landspeeder, though, until Obi-Wan admits, with a mixture of embarrassment and gratitude, that yes, he’ll need some help to fix that.

Once, a Jedi knight was everyone’s picture of competence, the help that you called. He’s confident he can still wield a lightsaber with grace and speed, still take on multiple opponents, still defuse most situations before weapons are even needed. He could tip that vaporator back upright without too much trouble, using a thought and a silent word. 

But he would have no idea what to do with the tangle of wires that poke out where the control panel has been torn away.

He thought he’d settled in well to his life here on Tatooine, his exile from all he’d known, his duty to watch over the child. 

But in all this time, he’s never learned to repair a vaporator.

 

Owen climbs down from the landspeeder. He unstraps a metal toolbox in the cargo bay, unclasps the lid and rummages inside. He hands a wrench to Obi-Wan and, still silent, ducks between the vaporator and the wall, then braces a shoulder against the metal tower. 

Obi-Wan’s known Owen for five years now. They’re neighbors, of a sort, in the emptiness of the Chott Salt Flat and the wider Jundland Wastes. Owen has seen him sick and sweating in bed, unable even to call for help. This man has bathed his body while Obi-Wan’s mind was lost in fevered visions, as the Junkland fever held him in its grip. Fed him broth and warm water until his mind and body connected back together. Until he was safe to be alone again in his silent house out here in the sand. 

And yet Obi-Wan still doesn’t know this man, not really. He doesn’t know if the help in his illness or Owen’s arrival today represents a favor, a repayment, or just something neighbors do. 

Owen is red-faced, straining at the weight of the vaporator as it slowly begins to tip. Obi-Wan could finish the job, in seconds, from here.

But Owen has always been stern about talk of the Force. A Jedi--a former Jedi--might put ideas into young Luke’s head. Owen doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want to hear about it, doesn’t want it to exist here on Tatooine, where life is about good, hard work. Where space battles are only for the people crazy enough to leave.

Obi-Wan goes to the vaporator and puts his own shoulder next to Owen’s, and their combined strength is enough to stand it upright with ease.

For the next hour, they work together. They share the task of twisting new bolts into the tower’s base, anchoring it upright again. Owen is mostly silent, but also patient as he shows Obi-Wan this wire reconnects _here_ , test this switch _like this_ , bend this part back into shape using _this_ tool and then reconnect it like _that_. 

Finally, the vaporator humming softly, they peer together into the cistern. Water has begun to drip in slowly, drop by tiny drop.

“I’d best get back,” Owen says, brushing dirt and sand from his hands.

“Thank you.”

Owen shrugs that off. “Got a lot to do at the farm,” he says. “We figured your vaporator was down too. Beru thought we better check on you, make sure you had water.”

He finishes settling the tools in their places, clasps the lid of the tool box and reties the straps around it, then moves to climb back behind the landspeeder’s controls.

He’s already started the engine when Obi-Wan realizes what he said. “Owen?”

His neighbor--or maybe his friend?--looks up at him.

“How many of your vaporators are down?”

Owen answers plainly, as he seems to do everything. “All of them from the house to here. Haven’t checked the east field.” He puts his hands on the controls, sets the shifter in gear. “I reckon the neighbors are in the same way. So it’s me and Beru.” He squints up at the suns, still rising in the morning sky. “Long day ahead.”

“You need some help?”

Owen replies with a silent gesture, reaching across the bench seat, moving his energy rifle from there to the seat behind him. 

Obi-Wan climbs in.

 

On the way to the Lars homestead, the storm’s destruction is unmistakable. Vaporator towers, usually straight and tall against blue sky, are tilted or lying flat, some of them meters from their bases. The wind has reshaped the land around them, too, so that some are half-buried in new dunes.

The Lars’ homestead looks the same as ever. Beru is out front with a sandblower, clearing the last of the sand from the steps leading down. She turns it off as the landspeeder approaches, lifts the protectors from her ears, and shifts her goggles to the top of her head.

“You brought help,” she says, pleased, but Obi-Wan sees her expression change to confusion when he climbs from the speeder.

“Beru.” He greets her warmly, taking her gloved hand in his, and she smiles.

“Obi-Wan,” she says. “I didn't think Owen would ask.”

“He didn't,” Obi-Wan says. “I know I'm not his favorite person. But it sounded like another pair of hands would serve.”

Beru nods. “Owen says it's a mess out there.” 

Behind her, a little boy emerges from the doorway to the lower level. Blue eyes under sun-bleached hair peer up at Obi-Wan, even as he hangs back behind Beru’s legs. 

_How did I let this happen, that the boy doesn’t even know me? This isn't how it was supposed to go._

“Say hello, Luke. You remember Ben Kenobi.”

Ben. The name they'd agreed on, in case Luke came across the name Obi-Wan in the stories of the Clone Wars. So he wouldn't wonder. Wouldn't get ideas.

The boy steps out, shy but brave. “Hi Ben.”

“Hello, Luke.” Obi-Wan kneels to his level. “Are you going to help your Aunt and Uncle today?”

Luke immediately looks up at Beru, eyes shining. “Can I?”

She rests a hand on his head, gazing down at him fondly. “You’ll have to,” she says. “Everyone's got troubles today. We'll need all the hands we can get. You think you can help your uncle with the tools?”

“Yes!” And Luke is off running to help load up supplies. Owen's begun carrying transport cubes up from the storage area. He hands Luke the smallest one, just the right size for a five-year-old, and hefts a larger box up onto his shoulder. Together, they carry their burdens to the landspeeder, then go back for more.


End file.
